tripping the light fantastic toe

Just a thought, before the post-Wales chores ramp up:

<update_note> 

This made sense in summer 2013; I‘d been on holiday in the Land of Someone Else‘s Fathers. 

<update_note>

My trawl through'-oo-' words has led me to speculate on what it is about FOOTWORK that invites the collocation fancy. There are 59 usages (varieties?) of <adjective> + 'footwork' in the BNC, and over 10% of them have the advantage of alliteration. But there are more fancy footworks than fine footwork (2) or front-row, fast, and famous (1) put together.

1		FANCY FOOTWORK	9
2		DEFT FOOTWORK	5
3		GOOD FOOTWORK	5
4		NIMBLE FOOTWORK	4
5		CLASSICAL FOOTWORK	2
6		FINE FOOTWORK	2
7		NIFTY FOOTWORK	2
8		NEAT FOOTWORK	2
9		SWIFT FOOTWORK	2
10		TWINKY FOOTWORK	1

... etc. See more here. (The links in that table may take you to an expired session of mine.)



COCA  (BNC's  brash American cousin – bigger, of course) is even more conclusive, with 65 out of 156. Here are the top ten:

1		FANCY FOOTWORK	65
2		GOOD FOOTWORK	6
3		FAST FOOTWORK	6
4		INTRICATE FOOTWORK	4
5		GREAT FOOTWORK	3
6		BETTER FOOTWORK	3
7		EXCEPTIONAL FOOTWORK	2
8		EXCELLENT FOOTWORK	2
9		FINANCIAL FOOTWORK	2
10		LITTLE FOOTWORK	2

(As before, the links in the table might be useless.) G'night – it's been a long day.)

b

Update 2013.09.01.19:45 – Added this PS:

PS. ...And on the subject of footwork, my Welsh trip has made me think about miles. When I was at school my Latin master tried to convince me  that our word 'mile' is derived from mille passus. 'A thousand paces?' I thought. 'This was before Corn Flakes, mind you. Just how long were the Roman soldiers' legs?' But the Etymological Dictionary has won my youthful scepticism round.

An ancient Roman mile was 1,000 double paces (one step with each foot)...

It was still a fairly short mile ('about 4,860 feet ', says the dictionary); but everything was a bit smaller in those  days.

What about the Welsh milltir (a mile), though? There are traces of Latin in Welsh: ysgol and eglwys owe as much to Latin as école and église do. So I wonder if the Welsh milltir just happens to share its first syllable with mille and is actually derived from militaris, because the Welsh had their own measures for middle distances ta very much boyo and wanted to make it clear that these new-fangled long straight roads were being measured in military miles. Just a thought; don't quote me. (If there's a good dictionary of Welsh etymology somewhere out there, do let me know.)


And another thing, what's the Welsh for 'oriel window'? (I'm sure Milton Jones could make a better job of jokifying this; but I was struck by the fact that a 'gallery' is an oriel).

Update: 2013.09.27.12:35
Footer updated

Update 2013.10.15.14:40  – Footer updated

Update 2015.01.20.14:40  – And again:

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Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this. 

Freebies (Teaching resources:  nearly 48,200 views  and over 6,500 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with over 2,400 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.